The One Thing Izuru Kamukura Couldn't Predict
by Kalcifier
Summary: Post-School Mode. Izuru notices that the entirety of Class 78 has made it out of Hope's Peak, and comes back to investigate. He's not prepared for what he finds.


After the news of last night, I needed something ridiculous and not even remotely serious, so I wrote this. If you're in a similar position, I hope this helps, if only in the sense of "at least the world hasn't been ended by a bored teenage girl yet"

* * *

Izuru wasn't sure why he thought a world of despair would be less boring than the old one. The transition had been all right; there had been enough chaos, enough variables that he couldn't keep track of and analyze everything and so couldn't predict exactly what would happen.

But now that most of Japan was a barren wasteland, he was robbed of even the meager entertainment of human interactions. The most interesting thing that happened was people begging at the doors of his latest fortress, as if it was somehow his fault they couldn't survive on their own. Even then, they all seemed to follow the same script. "Please, you have to help me!" they'd say, as if he had to do anything for troglodytes like them. Then it would be, "Wait, what's that?" followed by the screams of terror as they were messily killed.

Honestly, was creativity so truly dead? He would have thought they'd at least want to make their last words more memorable.

Still, there was no point in leaving the vicinity of Hope's Peak. People would be dull no matter where he went, and at least here he could be reminded how much better he was than everyone else.

What this meant was that he was in a perfect position to see the doors of the academy opening and fifteen people stepping out. The fact that anyone had escaped was rather unsurprising; Junko's capricious nature was bound to ruin her plans eventually. More interesting was the fact that her sister was in the group. In all their interactions, she'd seemed little more than an automaton bound to Junko's will, yet here she was betraying her sister. Izuru had dismissed her as a waste of talent, a boring stereotype.

What seemed more likely was that Junko had changed her mind and had sent her sister out to sow despair in the group at a later date. Still, any deviation from the plan had to be better than his current state of mind-numbing tedium, so he decided to make the journey back to Hope's Peak.

Getting to the school was trivial, getting inside even easier. He didn't even bother to disable the traps. There was no sense in letting someone interrupt him, after all.

Of course, then he was inside the building, which was even more boring than he remembered. (Or so he'd like to say. In actuality, his memory was as perfect as the rest of him, so he was cursed to remember the tedium of his tenure at the school.)

He did his best to occupy himself mentally as he made his way to the data center. By the time he arrived, he'd found ways to improve upon all the security features, drafted a plan to take down the remaining bastions of order in the world, and come up with a ramen recipe that would be both possible and delicious with his current limited supplies.

The gates on each of the stairways had been closed, but the door to the data center was open. Izuru walked in to find Junko sitting at one of the screens. When she looked up, her grin was even more manic than usual. "Izuru!" she called. "I knew there had to be someone I could count on not to betray me!"

Izuru stayed by the door, weighing the chances of Junko attempting to hug him and finding them far too high. "What happened?" he asked.

"Oh my gosh, you are not going to believe this! It's just so despairingly absurd! See, they built this pink stuffed animal thing, and just as I was about to start the killing game, it beat up my Monokuma and stole the remote to open the doors!" She pulled out a pair of glasses and put them on, adjusting her demeanor to match. "Interestingly, that Monokuma should not have had the remote in its possession. I don't know where it got it from."

Izuru resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose. There were more important matters than Junko's obnoxious personalities; namely, that she managed to lie in such a fashion he couldn't find any tells. If only she hadn't chosen such a ridiculous story, he might even have been fooled.

She was obviously expecting a reaction, and when he failed to provide one, she sighed. "Well, if you don't believe me, the footage is on this monitor. Feel free to see for yourself." She giggled and brought her hands up to her face. "But don't say I didn't warn you!"

Junko restarted the video, and Izuru watched as a crudely-made stuffed toy suddenly sprung to life. As she had said, it somehow defeated her highly advanced Monokuma robot in a fight, spouting some nonsense about hope, and obtained a remote. Then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, it returned to being an inanimate object.

Izuru had barely been able to accept Junko becoming a good enough liar not to give herself away. There was no way she'd also somehow mastered video editing to a point that would fool him. Which meant that somehow, this absurd and nonsensical series of events may have actually occurred.

Finally, something he couldn't predict, and it came in the form of a pink stuffed rabbit with a lisp.

Junko gestured to the screen. "Weird, right? If YouCube was still around, I bet we could get millions of hits on a video like that!"

There was no point in encouraging her inanity. "Is it still here?" he asked instead.

She pouted. "Wow, I thought you hated boring things, but you're the most boring of the all!" He looked at her, impassive, and eventually she sniffled dramatically. "Yeah, it's still there. I couldn't bring myself to go back to the place where my plans were ruined and I was betrayed by my own sister. It's just too awful."

He walked out of the room. Junko could spend hours cycling through personalities to complain if he let her, and there was finally something more interesting to do. He didn't even have to compose any poems on the way down to the gymnasium, so focused was he on analyzing the situation. Class 78 did contain the Super High School Level Programmer, and as far as Izuru knew he was still alive. He'd probably been working on this robot for the past two months.

Of course, all his theories were blown to bits when he reached the gym. The thing was even more primitive than he'd realized from the video. It contained no motors, no speakers, not even a power source. It seemed to be full of shredded paper in place of stuffing. Someone had spilled paint on its skirt and made a half-hearted attempt to clean it off.

There was no way something as pathetic as this could behave the way it had in the video. An infant could have made something better!

He spent the rest of the evening disassembling the wretched thing, searching for some clue as to how it even kept from falling apart. At some point, Junko tried to summon him back to the data center, but after he took out the first three Monokumas she gave up. She still came on the intercom at regular intervals to cajole, threaten, and complain at him, but he ignored her easily. For once, he had something that wasn't boring, and it was exciting and maddening.

He didn't know how long he'd been sitting there when a woman came in behind him. She introduced herself as a representative of the Future Foundation, an organization which had apparently found the members of Class 78 and taken them in to join the fight against despair.

Ordinarily, Izuru couldn't care less about the organizations which claimed to stand for hope, but he had to figure out the secrets of this "Warlockuma". If that meant interacting with the simpletons who were his lowerclassmen, so be it.

To the representative's surprise, he agreed to come without a fight. He asked her to wait for a moment so he could prepare a gesture of goodwill. When she agreed, he went up the stairs to apprehend Junko. He came back down with her unconscious body over his shoulder, ignoring the representative's surprise, and they left the school.


End file.
